Document Type

Honors Thesis

Publication Date

Spring 2019

Abstract

Sumer has a culture lost to history. Currently, the University of Maine offers no courses about ancient Mesopotamia, one of the first civilizations. Over the years, historians have been translating the cuneiform tablets containing their religion and history. There has been one adaptation of those translations, by Diane Wolkstein in 1983 to bring the stories to a wider audience through a collection of stories around the goddess Inanna. Wolkstein’s Inanna is a second wave feminist icon but reliant on an essentialist idea of womanhood. This thesis seeks to broaden her audience, analyze the context in which Wolkstein produced her adaptation, and present the stories of Inanna from a modern perspective, through the process of writing and directing an adaptation of the myths of Inanna.

Theater is a platform that gives playwrights a way to share their adaptations of untold stories, and directors a place to interpret. It is a place to introduce new re-tellings of old stories with room for creativity at each stage. This stage adaptation considers Wolkstein’s Inanna, as well as tablet translations from Samuel Noah Kramer, to produce Inanna for a modern audience.

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